Comfortractor, Agin

Yesterday, one of my missions was to take more pictures of the Comfortractor, featured in an earlier post. I went to the spot where it had been only to find it was GONE! All that was left was the patch of sunburned, matted grass on which it'd been standing. I wondered whether it had been sold, stolen or just taken away by its owner. Disappointed I went off to meet my brother and sister-in-law for lunch. Together with her sister and husband, we all enjoyed lunch and a nice visit at one of the "pork tents," then went off to visit other venues.


I went on to take pictures of the wheelwrights making a cart, then looked in on a group of blacksmiths. I happened to look up. There, in the storage shed, in all its orange gloriousness, was my beloved Comfortractor. It was hooked up to a trickle charger, possibly in preparation for the evening's tractor parade.

Of course, I took more pictures, this time of its interior.

I hope you enjoy this idiosyncratic beastie as much as I have.

How could you not?

The Comfortractor

It's the second day of the Fair and I went to join other photographers for what the Fair's promotional staff was calling a "Digital Shootout." I spent all morning taking pictures, making a lap of the grounds where I saw a few new (for me) and unusual sights. The most astonishing of these was the Minneapolis-Moline UDLX Comfortractor, which I saw amid a disply of its more usual-looking cousins and wondered, WTF?

Introduced in 1938 by Minneapolis-Moline, a tractor company with a reputation for producing reliable farm machinery, the Comfortractor was meant as a crossover vehicle, one that could plow the fields during the week, then take  its owner into town on the weekends, where he could party with his lady friend. The tractor's bright orange body work enclosed a heated cab in which there was room for two people on a padded seat. Among other features, there was a cigarette lighter, a "knicknack" box, a dashboard sporting a speedometer (up to 45 MPH!), oil pressure and water temperature gauges, as well as a clock. It had fenders and a bumper.

Trouble was, it was a machine that came into being ahead of it's time. The country was still sluggish, just emerging from the Great Depression, and the price tag, at $2,150, was a bit steep for its time. There were only 150 of the Comfortractors produced, so they are a pleasant rarity when they show up at antique shows.